Database Reference
In-Depth Information
1.
Click the Creation Date field to select it
.
The selection handles appear to let you know you're on the right track.
2.
While pressing Shift, click the Modification Timestamp field
.
Because you pressed Shift, the Creation Date stays selected, and the Modification
Timestamp field is selected, too.
3.
In the Inspector, turn off the Browse Mode checkbox
.
This prevents folks from accidentally typing in these fields.
4.
Select the Email Address field. Turn on “Select entire contents on entry.”
An email address is exactly the kind of thing you often copy but rarely edit.
5.
Turn on “Do not apply visual spell-checking.”
It would be awesome if FileMaker could tell you when you've mistyped an email ad-
dress, but the spell checker can't know if that address is supposed to start with “chun-
kylover53” or not. There's no sense spell checking something that's never going to be
in the dictionary.
6.
Click OK and then switch to Browse mode
.
You can now try out your changes. Refer to
Figure 7-29
if you're not sure what you're
looking for.
Tab Order
When you press Tab while editing a field, FileMaker automatically jumps you to the next
field. But what does
next
mean? Normally, FileMaker moves through fields in a left-to-right,
then top-to-bottom direction. That works well in many cases, but sometimes it falls short.
For instance, on your People Detail layout, when you tab from the First Name field, it
doesn't go to the Last Name field next. Instead, it goes to the Status field (a pop-up menu, so
you can't type into it even if you want to), which is probably not what you want. And what if
you want to be able to tab to a button? Or press Return to go to the next field instead? You're
going to have to customize the
tab order
yourself. In other words, you tell FileMaker exactly
what order it should tab through the fields and other objects on a layout.
Customizing the Tab Order
FileMaker lets you completely customize the tab order for any layout. To fix the tab order on
the Detail layout of your People database, first, in Layout mode, choose Layouts→Set Tab
Order. A few things happen onscreen: You see the arrows indicating tab order, and the Set
